BSLA Fieldbook BSLA 2014 Fall Fieldbook | Página 37

TOOLBOX / BSLA

ZONE
PUSHER
O ur d i s t urba nc e l eve l a s a
s p e c i e s h a s g l oba l i mp a c t , bu t
we are no t t h e f i r s t t o c r e a t e a
d i st u rba nc e o n a ma s s ive s c a l e
SCOTT BISHOP, ASLA

P

eruse any of the major garden websites
and you will find Zone Pushers—the
term for the likely fellow that wishes to
ignore the fairly specific guidance printed
after the floristic description of a plant
material in a catalog known as the USDA
Plant Hardiness Zone (UPHZ).

landscape architects. We must not only
retool, but retool at the scale of the impact
equivalent to our current activities as a
collective species. It is not so much that
we can balance what has already been
done, but rather set up the conditions
over time for productive change.

Zone Pushers—these folks kill off poor
and innocent plants in record numbers
that were not meant to grow where they
planted them. The sadistic horticulturalist
may have sane cause for observing so
many failures and perhaps a few successes
as they relate to display or novelty.

Disturbances over the
Millennia

Many in our profession will admit to
being a self-proclaimed zone pusher of
sorts, as we are typically less concerned
with individual plant performance than
we are with the performance of plants as
structures and communities as they relate
to changing climate, human interactions,
and time.
The UPHZ can still be utilized successfully
today, but perhaps best so with specific
limits of a species in a specific place at a
specific time. Where it lacks usefulness is
in regard to the lifespan of a forest. How
can it be projective given the unknown
effects of our own global chemistry
experiment? This is work we must do as

Our disturbance level as a species has
global impact, but we are not the first
to create a disturbance on a massive
scale. Forests in New England have
experienced many disturbances over
the past two millennia. The glacial and
interglacial periods of the Quaternary
period have erased, chased, and in some
cases, even eradicated entire forests of
their array o b7V6